"Any good up-to-date anti-virus will prevent you from opening a malicious worm or virus no matter how it arrived. Until and unless you click the attachment the virus or worm will not execute."
Yep. A file in an email is just like a file on the Internet. Your antivirus is "watching" everything you click.
I can't link to this quote but it's part of a discussion I'm in ATM. I'm also leaving out a few parts for various reasons... Verifies what we have been saying.
When you open up any folders, AV programs will scan files in the folder even before you do anything with them. If you have lots of files and subfolders, and you open it up just to quickly look at say a small text file, you may have a very long delay before you can do anything in the Window due to the AV. AVs also can cause extremely long delay in getting the Add/Remove Programs form to populate.
